Ramp vs Expensify: Pricing and Receipt Scanning

Last updated August 2026. Ramp rates were read from ramp.com/pricing on 23 August 2026. Expensify rates are from the Expensify pricing page and from Expensify filings with the SEC.

Ramp starts at $0 per user per month and Expensify starts at $5 per member per month, but that gap is a difference in business model rather than a discount. Ramp is a corporate card issuer that earns interchange on the spend it processes, so its free tier assumes your company card moves to Ramp. Expensify sells a software subscription that works whatever card you carry. Ramp Plus, the tier most teams actually need for expense policy enforcement, is $15 per user per month plus a platform fee based on team size, which is roughly three times Expensify Collect.

Ramp vs Expensify pricing in 2026

Both companies publish a rate card, which already puts them ahead of most of this category. Here is what each one lists.

Two things in that table deserve more attention than they usually get. The first is the phrase plus a platform fee based on team size next to Ramp Plus. Ramp does not publish what that fee is, so $15 per user is a floor and not a quote. The second is that Expensify counts members who were active in the previous month rather than everyone with a login. In a company where half the staff never file an expense, those two rules pull the real cost in opposite directions from the sticker price.

Why is Ramp free and Expensify is not?

Ramp issues corporate cards and earns interchange on every transaction that runs through them. That revenue funds the software, which is why Ramp can give away card issuing, unlimited virtual and physical cards, basic accounting rules, and the QuickBooks Online and Xero integrations at no charge. Expensify sells subscriptions to software and reports subscription fees as its primary revenue, so it charges per member. Neither model is more honest than the other, but they lead to very different answers depending on whether you want to change who issues your company card.

This is the actual decision, and it is worth being blunt about it. If you are willing to move company spend onto a Ramp card, Ramp Free is genuinely free and hard to beat on price. If you are not, because you have a banking relationship you like, a rewards card you want to keep, or a treasury policy that rules it out, then the free tier is much less useful than it looks, and you are comparing Ramp Plus at $15 against Expensify Collect at $5.

What a 20 person team actually pays

Take a 20 person company where 14 people file expenses in a typical month. Using published rates only, and leaving out the Ramp platform fee because it is not published:

The spread from $0 to $300 for the same 20 people is the whole story of this comparison. Ramp is either the cheapest option on the market or the most expensive one, and which of those it is depends entirely on whether you adopt its card. There is no middle position. Expensify sits in a narrow, predictable band either way, which is worth something to a finance lead who has to forecast.

How Ramp and Expensify handle receipts

This is where the two products differ most, and price comparisons usually skip it. Expensify SmartScan reads a receipt on its own. You photograph it, forward it by email, or upload it, and Expensify returns the merchant, the date and the amount, whether or not a matching card charge exists anywhere. Ramp lists automatic receipt collection and matching, which is a different job: it pairs an incoming receipt with a transaction that already ran on a Ramp card.

The practical consequence: Ramp is stronger at making sure a receipt exists for a card charge, and Expensify is stronger at getting data off a receipt that has no card charge behind it. If most of your spend is on personal cards later reimbursed, or on vendor invoices, or on a card Ramp does not issue, Ramp receipt matching has less to work with. If your spend is already on Ramp cards, its enforcement tooling, particularly automatically locking a card when a receipt is overdue, does something Expensify does not.

Which is better for policy enforcement and audit?

Ramp, on the published feature list, and by a clear margin on the Plus tier. Auto-locking cards for overdue receipts, missing receipt affidavits, requiring itemized receipts, flagging alcohol spend and weekend transactions, parallel approvers, and routing approvals by GL code or entity are all things Ramp names explicitly. Expensify answers the same need with expense rules and approval workflows on Control, but it does not have the card-level lever, because it is not the card issuer in most deployments.

Whichever you choose, the enforcement rules only help at audit time if someone has written down which obligations they are meant to satisfy and who owns each one. Teams that keep a spend policy in a document and the actual controls in a SaaS tool tend to discover the gap during the audit rather than before it, which is why it is worth taking the time to map each policy obligation to a named control and owner while you are configuring the tool, not a year later.

Which is cheaper, Ramp or Expensify?

Ramp is cheaper if you adopt Ramp cards, because the Free tier costs nothing and covers card issuing, basic accounting rules and the QuickBooks Online and Xero integrations. Expensify is cheaper if you keep your existing cards, because Collect at $5 per active member is a third of Ramp Plus at $15 per user, and Expensify bills only for members who were active in the previous month rather than for every seat.

Does Ramp charge per user?

Yes on the paid tiers. Ramp Free is $0 per user per month, Ramp Plus is $15 per user per month plus an unpublished platform fee that scales with team size, and Enterprise is custom priced on annual billing. Ramp also lists 1099 filing at $0.65 per IRS filing with free state filing across all three tiers, which is the one named usage charge on its rate card.

Can you use Ramp without the Ramp card?

You can use the software, but you give up most of what makes the free tier worth having. Ramp revenue model is built on interchange from card spend, and its receipt workflow is described as collection and matching, which needs a Ramp transaction to match against. Reimbursements and bill pay work without it, but a team that keeps its existing card is buying a thinner product at the same price.

Is Expensify or Ramp better for a small business?

For a small business already happy to switch cards, Ramp Free is the strongest value in this category and there is not much to argue about. For a small business that wants expense reports, receipt data and accounting sync without changing its banking, Expensify Collect at $5 per member is the cheaper and less disruptive answer. The full Expensify rate card, including the billing rules taken from its SEC filings, is on our Expensify pricing breakdown.

What neither of them is

Both Ramp and Expensify are expense platforms. You are buying approvals, reimbursement, cards, policy and a general ledger sync, and the receipt reading is one feature inside that. That is the right purchase for a company with an expense policy and a reimbursement cycle.

It is the wrong purchase for a different and very common job: a bookkeeper or accountant who has a pile of receipts and invoices belonging to clients, and needs the merchant, date, tax and total as rows in a spreadsheet. Seat licences do not fit that work, because the cost scales with people while the workload scales with documents. If that is the job, look at per-document extraction rather than per-seat software, whether that is our Expensify alternative route or simply collecting employee receipts without buying everyone a licence.

How to decide, in three questions

First, will your company move its card spend to Ramp? If yes, start with Ramp Free and only pay for Plus when you need policy enforcement. If no, Ramp Plus at $15 is competing with Expensify Collect at $5 and it needs to justify the gap.

Second, does your accounting system force a tier? Expensify puts NetSuite, Sage Intacct and QuickBooks Desktop on Control, and Ramp puts Workday and Oracle Fusion Cloud on Enterprise. Check this before you compare headline rates, because it often removes the cheap tier from the table entirely.

Third, is the thing you actually need the workflow or the data? If it is the workflow, buy a platform. If it is the data, you are looking at the wrong category, and a per-document tool will cost less and finish sooner. You can compare vendor rate cards on that side of the market in our OCR API pricing comparison.

Want to see the extraction step by itself before you commit to a seat licence? Upload a receipt at the top of this page and check the fields that come back.